Go fourth and keep inspiring me!

As someone who never really had more than a passing interest in art I am absolutely loving my artistic journey. It’s introduced me to so many great models and photographers, and allowed me to create a huge number of images that I absolutely adore and which give me so much pleasure in all stages of their creation, and sharing them with others.

An important part of that journey has been my work with the very special Lulu Lockhart. It’s no secret that she is my favourite model, and it’s the fourth anniversary of when we first worked together today – hence the deliberately misspelt reference to ‘forth’  in the blog post title – and from the outset her posing and looks really inspired me, and also straight away we got on so well together, which is very important when you spend long periods of time together on location shoots. She came along and rejuvenated my interest in photography when really I needed it, for which I will always be grateful. I’ve found that the people I’ve met have been just as an important part of my photography as my images.

I generally shoot images of a single photographic genre, and people have wondered whether I’m getting bored of model photography, or am running out of ideas for working with Lulu. A number of people have compared some of our images to the great American artist Andrew Wyeth, and I think one of his quotes sums up the philosophy of how Lulu and I work together quite well:

“Most artists look for something fresh to paint; frankly I find that quite boring. For me it is much more exciting to find fresh meaning in something familiar.”

Wyeth worked with his muse Helga for fifteen years, so it looks like we’ve got at least another 11 years together :)

This isn’t a retrospective of those past 4 years, just a selection of recent images I’ve edited. I produced a Blurb book of the images from the first 18 months we worked together in 2016, and I’m currently putting the finishing touches together for another one with our images since then. Watch this blog for more details.

We’ll start with some images from a super trip to Corsica last year, there are so many great images from the trip it’s difficult to choose from them, so these are just a starter. It was warmer and brighter than it was supposed to be, so we did a lot of our work early morning or late evening.

Sometimes we also found some shade which gave a different look.

And when it was too bright outdoors I had ensured that our accommodation was also suitable for producing images,

A couple of images I really like from our forthcoming workshop location, which filled up very quickly. Apologies for those who missed out we are currently sorting out a second date.

To produce many of our images Lulu often has to pose in conditions that are awkward/uncomfortable/cold/rough/cramped/precarious  – delete as applicable! For which I am extremely grateful, and here’s a few examples.

And I’ll finish with a few images edited recently from older shoots that I really like.

Apologies for the large number of images in this post, there’s loads more I need to get around to editing and posting, and we’re still producing them at a great rate of knots as well.

Thank you Lulu for all the great times over the last four years, for rejuvenating my photography, for all of the wonderful images, and for continuing to inspire me. Here’s to all our future adventures, and to the next book of our images.